


how they make a man sing

by Anonymous



Category: Sweeney Todd - Sondheim/Wheeler
Genre: Butchering, Gen, Makeup, skin care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-19 01:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11302812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: THE SECRETONE BOXof Dr. MACKENZIE’S IMPROVED HARMLESS ARSENIC COMPLEXION WAFERS will produce the most lovely complexion that the imagination could desire, clear, fresh, free from blotch, blemish, coarseness, redness, freckles, or pimples. Post free for 4s. 6d. ; half boxes, 2s. 9d.— S. HARVEY, 5, Denman St., London Bridge, S. E.





	how they make a man sing

**I.**

> THE SECRET  
>  ONE BOX
> 
> of Dr. MACKENZIE’S IMPROVED HARMLESS ARSENIC COMPLEXION WAFERS will produce the most lovely complexion that the imagination could desire, clear, fresh, free from blotch, blemish, coarseness, redness, freckles, or pimples. Post free for 4s. 6d. ; half boxes, 2s. 9d.— S. HARVEY, 5, Denman St., London Bridge, S. E. Use Dr. MacKenzie’s ARSENICAL TOILET SOAP 1s. per Tablet; No. 2, unscented, 6d. per Tablet. Made from Purest Ingredients, and Absolutely Harmless. 
> 
> _BEWARE OF THE MANY IMITATIONS. Have Dr. Mackenzie’s or none._

In Bavaria, so they say, the ladies bathe in an arsenic spring and emerge like Aphrodite from the sea with skin of transparent whiteness. For those in gloomy England there is still hope: creams and preparations for the skin, lemon juice or belladonna to brighten the eyes, foods to eat and to avoid. Young ladies of good family agonize over the precise amount of beet juice they can rub into their cheeks to catch a husband without bringing their morals into question.

But for those who do not concern themselves with respectability, the socialites and actresses and courtesans, there are other options. The enameled ladies fill in their pockmarks and wrinkles with a yielding paste to create a surface of flawless smoothness, which they cover with a paint with a base of white lead. Then comes rouge for the lips and cheeks—red mercury produces a particularly fine hue—and soot for the brows and lashes. Last, the most skillful touch: blue veins painted on shoulders and neck and arms to create the impression of translucence.

The enamel damages the skin, of course. Its wearers require more and more until it becomes a shell, a protective carapace for the corroding skin beneath. Their faces would crack like porcelain if they smiled.

Johanna saw one of them once from her window. It was late in the spring, and coming through the warm twilight her serene face looked like a queen from out of antiquity, a statue come to life.

Then the beadle made his appearance. He stopped her, said something, leaning in very close—she slapped him—he blew his whistle.

The policeman who came seized her by the arm and immediately dropped it. He looked down at the smear of paint on his hand and gave her a shove, and she stumbled—fell to her hands and knees in the refuse of the street, his handprint on her back.

Judge Turpin absolutely forbids the use of any such artifice: there will be no indecent women in his house. The freckle-faced maid, who when they were alone would tell Johanna laughingly about her fifteen siblings and the boys she danced with, who envied Johanna’s complexion—she once dared tint her cheeks, ever so lightly. When he saw her, the judge dismissed her on the spot. Her replacement was an old woman with a great dark birthmark consuming half her face from eye to chin.

Johanna washes her face with nothing but water, virtuously cold. After consultation with several esteemed gentlemen of his acquaintance, the judge has seen fit to provide her with cold cream, delicately scented with rosewater; this she smoothes into her skin nightly under his stern eye. He makes sure she never misses a spot.

Hers is not the meticulously cultivated paleness of the beauties who play croquet and lawn-tennis, go sailing and gardening in bonnets and parasols and gloves; who wash themselves with buttermilk and carefully pumice away any sign of roughness from their dainty hands; who strive against the bloom of their youth to maintain the fragile beauty of the consumptive.

Johanna’s is the genuine, all-natural, effortless pallor of an eyeless thing born in a cave; of a dead thing, bloating in dark river water.

\----

**II.**

> For years a prominent society lady, noted for her exquisite skin and complexion, has used a cream made from the following recipe: 
> 
> 1 oz. Spermaceti.  
>  1 oz. White Wax.  
>  1 oz. Benzoated Lard.  
>  2 oz. Almond Oil.  
>  ¼ oz. Camphor Gum.  
> 
> 
> Dissolve the camphor gum in the oil, and add the other ingredients, heating the whole only to melt. When melted, beat with a fork for one hour, or until perfectly cold, white and creamy.

In an era where surgeons are little more than butchers for the living, a butcher may know all the secrets of the body as well as a surgeon.

Mrs. Lovett has butchered a pig or two in her time, and the truth is they’re all the same on the inside, pig and pigeon and pussycat and person; just some parts are a little bigger or smaller.

(Testicles. Pigeons have testicles the size of their feathery little heads. Creamy, too.)

Sweeney does a neat job with his razor: his customers bleed out cleanly, leaving no blood to spoil the meat. The stiff windpipe and elastic gullet have already been severed; for Mrs. Lovett it remains only to draw the knife gently across—the handle is only wood, but the blade shines wickedly bright—and the thick tendons of the neck part.

She’s alone. There’s no one here to see her hike up her skirt and clamber half onto the counter, pin the body with a knee to the back; grab it about the ears, and twist.

Climb down. Set the head aside for the moment.

Cut out the arsehole—careful, now, to avoid piercing the bowel—then, working from the inside out, straight up the belly to the breastbone. This reveals the coiled intestines, still warm when she buries her hands among them and pulls them out. Their contents must be disposed of, but that will come later.

Sometimes Mrs. Lovett sees a man going upstairs to Sweeney and knows by his rosy nose that his liver will come out bumpy and foul, but this one is a rich deep red, the lovely color of the jam in a currant pie. She lifts it out with both hands. Behind it, the kidneys, to be scooped out of their nest.

Then the stomach—this one shrunken ascetically small—and the long belly sweetbread. Wrap both windpipe and gullet around a fist and pull them out from the inside; which also frees the spongy lungs, delicately pink and startlingly weightless. Cradled between them lies the heart, a heavy dense knot. Later she’ll cut it open and slice it into thin strips for frying.

In other quarters of the city, the ladies spend a fortune on lotions which contain balsam of Peru, attar of roses, ambergris, isinglass, alumina-milk, myrrh, and other expensive exotics.

Mrs. Lovett is long past dreaming of such things. But the base of any effective formulation must be the simple emulsion of fat and water; and however stern he was in life, how upright, however unbending, a gentleman is soft and wet on the inside. As her thick-knuckled, unlovely hands go to work in the carcass before her—carving apart the shoulder and the loin, the fatty belly, the buttocks and thighs—its richness undoes the hardness of years.

Sweeney Todd, who was once a romantic, absentmindedly kisses her fingertips as they lie together in bed.

\----

**III.**

> _To make a calf’s head pie_
> 
> CLEANSE your head very well, and boil it until it is tender; then carefully take off the flesh as whole as you can, take out the eyes and slice the tongue; make a good puff-paste crust, cover the dish, lay on your meat throw over it the tongue, lay the eyes cut in two, at each corner.... In the mean time boil the bones of the head in two quarts of liquor....have half the brains chopped with some sage; beat them, and twelve leaves of sage chopped fine; stir all together, and give it a boil; take the other part of the brains, and beat them with some of the sage chopped fine.... This is a fine dish; you may put in it as many fine things as you please, but it wants no more addition.

Judge Turpin’s hands are hard, but the meat grinder will take care of that.


End file.
